In a life dedicated to organizing people to make change—from working with SNCC and the United Farm Workers to Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, and President Obama—Marshall Ganz has seen and learned a lot about what the social sector gets wrong about structural change, lessons he’s passed on for decades as a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School. Today, democracy teeters as our capacity for collective action seems to have withered away. In his new book, People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal, Ganz has distilled a half-century’s worth of insights into an urgent call for strengthening democracy, both a practical guide on how to reclaim democratic power and an inspiring manifesto for collective organizing.

In his book, Ganz argues that what the social sector gets wrong about creating lasting and meaningful change is that this change only happens when people come together for a shared purpose, when they deliberate together, and when they act together, even when the future seems unknowable and the road uncertain. On November 13, 2024, just days after Donald Trump was elected president, at a public event hosted by Stanford PACS, Ganz was interviewed about building power and leadership by Tomás R. Jiménez, professor of sociology and comparative studies in race and ethnicity and the founding codirector of Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies. Their conversation has been edited for clarity.

Tomás: When people call for structural change, what do they get wrong right now about how it comes about?

Marshall: Where do we start? My first reaction is that they forget that it’s about people. They think it’s about branding, sound bites, clever memes. They think it’s about getting the right funder to fund you. But really, structural change is rooted in people, human beings, and the power we can create with each other when we find values we share, and our capacity to turn those values into sources of power.

Power is another really misunderstood thing. Power is not a thing you have; it’s an influence created through interdependence. We live in the world interdependently with others, and those interdependencies can be very fruitful: My resources, your needs, your needs, my resources. But at times, the resources we need are held by others who use that to substitute their will for our own and their interest for our own. That we call power. The challenge in organizing is understanding that power does not exist out there, in some bank or something. Resources are there, but this capacity to grow interdependence into sources of power, that's what we learned how to do in the [United Farm Workers of America]. I mean, if I have a food store, the only food store in town, it gives me a lot of power, right? Because they need what I got. But then Gandhi comes to town, everybody goes on a fast, and my power is gone.

Read the full article about the social sector and structural change at Stanford Social Innovation Review.